IT system monitoring is one of the most important ways IT teams can manage their network security. It provides them with a clear view of their endpoints, network, applications, and more, empowering agents to identify and address issues as they arise.
However, many businesses overlook the importance of monitoring IT systems and fail to invest in it, leaving their IT teams without the support and tools they need. As such, it’s time to explore the benefits, challenges, and best practices for IT system monitoring and see how Splashtop AEM provides unprecedented visibility into your endpoints.
What is IT System Monitoring?
IT system monitoring is the process of tracking and managing an organization’s IT infrastructure, including its servers, networks, endpoints, databases, and apps. Proper IT system monitoring tracks several key metrics, such as server uptime, network health, and software performance, to ensure everything is running smoothly.
IT system monitoring helps IT agents detect issues early on, so they can address them before they become a problem. This helps maintain high performance, keep IT environments safe, and protect networks from potential threats and vulnerabilities.
Why is System Monitoring Important for Businesses?
IT system monitoring is an important aspect of cybersecurity and maintaining productivity. With proper system monitoring, you can reduce downtime, enhance performance, and keep your systems secure, and that’s just for starters.
The benefits of IT system monitoring include:
Performance optimization: Regularly analyzing metrics and performance can provide valuable insights into your network and identify areas for improvement.
Security: System monitoring helps identify suspicious behavior or patterns quickly. This lets IT teams proactively address them, as well as ensure timely security patches and updates.
Proactive maintenance: IT system monitoring can identify potential issues before they escalate, so IT teams can repair problems before they cause damage.
Improved compliance: Proper security and analytics are important parts of IT compliance, and IT system monitoring helps meet those regulatory needs by ensuring all endpoints and networks are protected, monitored, and kept up-to-date.
What to Monitor in IT Systems?
While IT system monitoring is an important task, it’s also rather vague – several elements and aspects of IT systems can and should be monitored, so it’s important to know where to start.
Key data to track includes:
Log data, which includes any data written to a log file across your IT environment.
Asset data, including CPU usage as well as the processes and applications run on each asset.
Network data, including bandwidth, network connection details, and routing behavior.
Connectivity, including connections both into and out of your infrastructure.
Infrastructure, including disk latency, the number of users logged in, power usage, and memory data.
Application metrics, such as time, error rate, and resource usage.
While each of these data sources includes a variety of metrics and information, tracking them is essential to understand how your IT assets are performing on both application and service levels.
6 Key Phases of IT System Monitoring
IT system monitoring is a process that consists of multiple steps, each one of which is important for ensuring system reliability and performance. These steps are:
Planning: Before anything else, you need to make a plan, including setting goals and priorities, determining what to monitor, and establishing metrics. This should include a service health model, defined types of events, criteria for event detection, the priority for each event, and responses.
Detection: Detection and logging are the first steps of the monitoring process. This is where IT monitoring systems alert users when the established thresholds are exceeded, allowing agents to address any potential issues.
Filtering: Once a potential concern is detected, the IT monitoring system can filter and correlate it based on criteria such as source, level, and time, and check patterns from other alerts to determine if there’s an issue.
Classification: Once the event is detected and filtered, it’s classified according to set criteria, such as its type and priority, so IT teams can respond appropriately.
Response: Once the event is identified and classified, IT agents must respond to it properly. Depending on the IT monitoring system and event in question, this could be an automated process, or it could require agents to address the issue manually.
Review: After all is said and done, it’s important to review the event and its impact on IT systems. Regularly reviewing and monitoring your IT system monitoring plan and solution helps minimize damage and improve responsiveness for future events, keeping everything even more secure.
Common Hurdles in IT System Monitoring
While IT system monitoring is essential, IT teams should be aware of some challenges it can present. When you implement an IT monitoring system, keep these common obstacles in mind:
1. Limited Resources
IT system monitoring can put a strain on IT resources and stretch staff thin. Monitoring tools can gather large quantities of data that can take time and resources to properly analyze, so smaller organizations with a leaner IT staff and fewer resources might struggle to fully utilize their monitoring system.
2. Diverse Endpoint Environments
With the rise of remote/hybrid work, BYOD policies, and Internet of Things devices, employees are using a wider variety of devices and endpoints than ever before. IT teams often struggle to monitor and manage a diverse array of endpoints, but it’s essential to find IT monitoring software that can connect to and support every endpoint your employees use. Leaving devices out can create a huge blind spot in your network security.
3. Integrating Monitoring Tools
Monitoring tools can often require custom configurations or complex integrations to work properly. This means that setting up IT system monitoring can not only be time and resource-intensive, but can also encounter compatibility issues with legacy systems or outdated infrastructure. Organizations should ensure that their devices, applications, and operating systems are all up-to-date and can properly integrate with their monitoring solution of choice.
4. Scaling
It’s important to use a monitoring solution that can grow with your business. Whenever you add new users and endpoints, your solution should be able to add the additional devices without difficulty or skyrocketing costs. Make sure you find a scalable solution that can keep up with your growth with ease.
5. Too Many Alerts
IT system monitoring solutions can quickly analyze a large amount of data, and that can lead to an alert overload, including false positives and low-priority concerns. This can be counterproductive and overwhelm IT teams, but setting alert rules and using a solution with AI and Machine Learning-powered features can help sort through the noise and identify the important issues.
Optimizing IT System Monitoring: Best Practices
If you want to get the most out of your IT system monitoring solution, there are some key best practices you can follow. Keeping these points in mind will help your IT teams effectively manage your systems and seamlessly monitor endpoints across your network:
1. Manage Your Alerts
If you get alerts for every low-priority potential issue, you’ll overwhelm your IT team very quickly. Instead, set up alerts so that they receive high-priority notifications, enabling them to manage the biggest issues quickly and without becoming overwhelmed. You can also configure alerts with thresholds and escalation paths to ensure they’re not overlooked and can reach the right agent at the right time.
2. Ensure Security Compliance
Cybersecurity and IT compliance are essential for all aspects of your business, and IT system monitoring is a powerful security tool that lets you identify potential threats early on. Using IT system monitoring to ensure security compliance can help demonstrate that you’re meeting your security requirements and meet standards like GDPR or HIPAA compliance.
3. Establish Procedures
IT teams should understand how your IT monitoring system works, what it can do, and what their responsibilities are. Good, clear documentation establishing procedures can help ensure your IT agents all understand your monitoring strategy, tools, and procedures, so they can work effectively and efficiently.
4. Conduct Routing Performance Reviews
Regular performance reviews can help identify trends, issues, and room for growth. Be sure to monitor your metrics, such as CPU and memory usage, traffic, and response time, so you can identify areas that need work and focus on improving your monitoring process.
The Future of IT System Monitoring: Key Trends to Watch
IT system monitoring is a powerful tool, and it’s only getting better as technology advances. Recent developments have helped make monitoring solutions more accurate, efficient, and powerful, so IT teams can break through the noise and address the highest-priority issues.
One of the biggest trends in IT system monitoring is the growth of AI and Machine Learning technology. These enable IT monitoring systems to quickly analyze and sort through large amounts of data to identify patterns and suspicious behavior, sort through the clutter to identify the high-priority concerns, and automate responses. This automates multiple time-consuming processes, while providing clear and actionable insights for IT teams.
As a result, AI and ML technology can address inefficiencies, reduce costs, and improve analysis, even in complex IT environments. These tools can be used alongside IT agents to efficiently respond to alerts and resolve issues without requiring agents to sort through every low-priority alert and false positive.
Additionally, IT monitoring solutions have grown more holistic, encompassing multiple endpoints, applications, and operating systems from a single console. This provides a unified view of an organization’s IT environment, so IT teams can get the full picture and a more thorough analysis of issues and alerts. As a result, IT agents can efficiently protect their endpoints and network from a single place, even in complex and remote environments.
Transform IT System Monitoring with Splashtop AEM
Without the right tools, IT system monitoring can be a challenge that drains IT resources and overwhelms your IT staff. Fortunately, there are solutions designed to provide a holistic view of your network and infrastructure, including Splashtop AEM (Autonomous Endpoint Management).
Splashtop AEM provides remote monitoring and management for endpoints across your network, including remote devices on any operating system. With Splashtop AEM, you can streamline IT operations, automate tasks, and keep your endpoints secure and compliant from a single console.
Splashtop AEM enables IT teams to manage multiple endpoints from a single-pane dashboard, including monitoring security health, maintaining compliance, and tracking assets. With its AI-powered CVE insights, Splashtop AEM can quickly identify risks and vulnerabilities, complete with proactive alerts and automated fixes via Smart Actions.
Plus, Splashtop AEM’s dashboard insights let you monitor endpoint health, patch statuses, and compliance, while its inventory reporting provides a full overview of your system, hardware, and software inventory.
Why Splashtop AEM Is Your Go-To Solution for IT System Monitoring
IT system monitoring is essential for maintaining security, compliance, and efficiency, but it must be implemented properly. This means knowing what to monitor, following best practices, and using a solution that meets all your business needs, like Splashtop AEM.
IT teams are often overloaded with tickets and requests, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Most IT issues can be addressed and prevented with the right tools before the employee even needs to file a ticket. Splashtop AEM provides IT teams with the tools and technology they need to monitor endpoints, proactively address issues, and reduce their workloads. This includes:
Alerts and remediation to automatically resolve issues before they become problems.
Real-time monitoring across your endpoints.
Automated patching for OS, third-party, and custom apps.
AI-powered CVE-based vulnerability insights.
Customizable policy frameworks that can be enforced throughout your network.
Hardware and software inventory tracking and management.
Background actions to access tools like task managers and device managers without interrupting users.
Ready to get started? You can experience Splashtop AEM for yourself with a free trial today:
